When I reoriented myself this morning after a restless night and a couple of hours of trying to go back to sleep and finally giving up, I was startled to see, after getting my computer going, that it has been only two days since I last posted here. It seems like a week.

First, let me tell you that we are once again amazed by grace that we find ourselves safely and comfortably sheltered, fed and counseled by dear old friends. We are presently staying at the home of Mick and Marg Horwood in Brisbane.

I stumbled out into the garden this morning to take a couple of pictures, because I can’t stand to write without images, even if they have little to do with my subject matter:

Above is an image of promise, fat little strawberries growing warm in the morning sun.

The title today, The Way Things Happen is very ambiguous. I don’t have a lot of time to write, so I’ll have to cram it in quickly, like my breakfast. What follows is a digest of random happenings mostly good, some less so. Don’t expect it to make any sense.

My charger for my Canon G11 has chosen the morning to give up the ghost. Fortunately, I brought my Olympus SP590UZ along and it uses AA batteries. So, when the Canon battery dies, I’ll still have a camera. Okay, bad news, good news.

As I mentioned, we have once again found safe haven to protect and nourish us as we face the current terrors.

Our dear friend Richard Jones showed up yesterday evening from Madang. I am astounded, but not surprised at the love that is being poured out for Eunie. Carol Dover, recently relocated in Vanuatu, is also flying in soon.

This is a plant I found in the Horwood’s garden that seems unlikely – possibly designed by a committee:

You will note a very nice lemon tree in the background.

Our son, Hans, arrives today from Hamilton, Ontario. It’s difficult for me to express my emotions now, because I have to maintain a certain numbness. It will be good to have him here to see his mom and hear with us what the future holds.

Regular readers will know that I don’t throw my religious beliefs in your face. It’s not the purpose of this journal. Ask me, I’ll tell you. However, I must say that it is a strange experience to be wandering in this desert of profound negative feelings, which you can imagine for yourself. What makes it stranger yet, but eases the journey, is the way that every time we get to the point where I am thinking to myself that I simply do not know what to do, some unexpected door opens and I find an oasis of relief. As for myself, I attribute this to God’s mercy.

Eunie and I have always known that we would have to travel such a road at some point. I always hoped that I would simply drop dead some day and Eunie could carry on. She’s so much better equipped to deal with life than I. Now the sequence seems to be in question.

All that I know for certain is that a couple of nights ago we nearly lost her. However, with the help of Val and her doctor’s house call (!), we got her back. I told Val quite frankly that, if she had not been there for us, Eunie would very likely not have survived another day.

That’s about all the rambling that I have time for this morning. Today is going to be interesting.

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I won’t go into the gory medical details, because it’s only the outcome that matters. Three nights ago, after seeing Eunie go downhill rapidly for several days while we were waiting for our appointments in Brisbane, she crashed. She was nearly unresponsive, could not stay awake and would not eat or drink. Val’s private GP came to the house after his office hours and said that we needed to get her into the Gympie Hospital, which we did the next morning with difficulty in Val’s car. He blood pressure was shocking. The anti-inflammatory she had been taking since receiving a stent in her bile duct had caused her to bleed in her stomach. They hooked up many hoses to her and began to rehydrate her. They also gave her two units of blood.

Eunie bounced back eventually after a morning of us hearing discouraging words. Yesterday, she was stable enough to transport her by ambulance to Wesley Hospital in Brisbane. She is scheduled today for an MRI and some other tests. There will be some other kind of scan also.

As of last night, she was in no pain. I expect within a few days to hear some prognosis from the oncologists.

NOTE: I am going to try to answer all of the comments that I am receiving and all of the email messages. Every message is important to me, but I may not be able to keep up with the flood. I’m sure that you will understand this.

Well, life’s vicissitudes being what they are, we now find ourselves in Gympie, Australia a couple of months before we planned to be. We had planned to take a long-overdue holiday break in Australia for a few weeks later this year.

We are staying in the home of our long-time friend Val Jerram, whose name has appeared many times here on Madang – Ples Bilonng Mi  before and is going to pop up more or less constantly in the misty future as we get treatment for Eunie’s medical problems. Read to the end of the post for news about that.

Though I should have known that it would be so, if I had had the power to think of some of the less pressing matters other than those which are daily squashing my mind into a sort of pudding-like substance incapable of no higher functions than basic animal instincts, the most intense of which is at the present time stark fear, I would have realised that I was in for yet another treat – it is freezing cold here in Gympie!

Sorry about that last paragraph. I just wanted to see if I’m still capable of writing a reasonably long sentence that is comprehensible. Did I make it?  I can’t tell.

Anyway, having missed several days of posting this month, I was determined to write, if for no other reason than to prove that my fingers still work. I ventured out into the freezing cold on Val’s veranda and got a shot of this blackish bird pecking away at some undoubtedly tasty grub in this bare tree limb:

I took the shot with the Bird Watching setting on my Olympus SP590-UZ. Though there are some aspects of the camera that don’t suit me, the 26X optical zoom is great and it has a wide range of “scene” modes that make it easy to get shots that would require a lot of fiddling with manual controls otherwise.

A few seconds later, I got the above bird’s handsomer cousin:

This place is a crazy house of birds all day long. I suspect that birds are going to be creeping in on the fish soon.

Here is a shot from Val’s veranda of the old Gympie courthouse:

I haven’t seen it up close, but it looks to be an interesting place to visit. This small city is also the home of the  Gympie Muster, the second largest country music festival in Australia.

Braving freezing temperatures this morning, I snapped some snapdragons:

And another one:

And that was the first morning in Gympie.

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Yesterday was scary. Eunie is sick, there’s no doubt of that. She could walk slowly. She put on a brave face, starting out at 05:30 for a cab ride to the Brisbane airport. We had to stop over in Townsville for a couple of hours and then fly to Brisbane, where we were met by Val. Then we had a little over two hours to Gympie in her car.

Eunie’s been resting today. I hope she gets some energy back. Watching any loved one, especially a spouse, go from strong and healthy to desperately ill in a matter of a couple of months is a shocking experience. It’s my first time.

I could do without it.

Under the heading of Best Laid Plans several have gone astray in the last couple of days. For the last few days I’ve been unable to connect to the Internet by my new wireless hop from the office because I failed to realise that the power at the coconut oil refinery was going to be horribly unreliable. Then, this morning, my brand-new Windows 7 installation on my desktop computer at home stayed stuck on the “Please wait . . . ” screen for two hours. How long  do I have to wait, for pity’s sake?

The wireless problem has been partially solved by moving the hop from the coconut oil refinery to the top of the big supermarket across the harbour from our house. I know that the power there will be reliable, because there is a tonne of refrigeration equipment there and it must be kept running. The generators there kick in withing 10 seconds day and night 356 days a year.

I spent about four hours up on the roof of the supermarket this morning in the blazing hot sun. I’m still taking an antibiotic that could make me “sun sensitive” whatever that means, but I didn’t remember that until we were just about finished. I’d had no breakfast and no water. I didn’t realise that I’d overdone it until my vision started to tunnel and my knees got so wobbly that I hardly made it down the ladder. When I got back to the office, I took my dripping wet shirt off and laid down on the couch in the reception area and begged for food and water. As I lay there recuperating, I reminded myself that several seemingly minor errors in succession can put one in a world of hurt when their effects accumulate.

I think that the Windows 7 installation failure after only one day of use was because I hooked up my old Vista hard disk to get the data off of it. The first time that I booted after that, I believe That Mr. Gates’ software got terminally confused and did a Vulcan Mind Meld between Vista and Windows 7. You can guess what the solution to this problem is. I’m working on my laptop now with a slow dial-up connection while I reinstall Windows 7. I have to be honest and say that this is the first real complaint that I’ve had against W7. Otherwise it has been a dream, a good  dream.

Enough about all that. We’re here to see some more of Val Jerram’s lovely images of India. I’m happy to have influenced Val to develop her photographic talents. She has a Flickr Pro account with thousands of images from her travels around the world. There is some very nice stuff there on Darby Dog at Flickr.

I wish that I had paid more attention to Val’s comments on these images. I was so addled that I just took the time to prepare them for WordPress and uploaded them. I can’t comment much on them, but that’s okay. Good images should speak for themselves. This one certainly has a vioce:Happy faces, eh?

This one I love. It’s a very well composed image. I did only a bit of cropping and reduced the saturation of the background to make the machines pop:The presence of the three women in the corner make background look like a giant poster.

Nice, juicy colours make this ordinary scene come alive:I find it amusing that most of the carts in the world today seem to have begun their lives as automobiles or trucks.

This fantasy of colour is the inside of a dome:And this mosaic must have taken thousands of hours to complete:

We are just beginning the four day Easter weekend here. I’ll be up early to try to get the wireless connection finished. At noon I’m taking Jo and Ush out on Faded Glory  for a swim. I’ll probably do a solo dive to get some images to keep the pages filled.

I hope it’s not too sunny.

I can’t believe that I’m saying that.

I so much enjoy featuring the images of friends who share my passion for photography. Our long-time friend Val Jerram is a perfect example. Val is a world traveller of the first order. She’s been everywhere, man! She recently sent me some images from her last visit to India. I’m happy to present them to you here. Val shoots with a high-end point-and-shoot camera; she’s had a variety of them. These are great examples of what can be done with them by someone who reads the manual and has a good pair of eyes for composition and the moment.

Here’s a nice example. This image of a man playing the Sitar seems, at first, not particularly special. It’s nice, but . . . Okay, now look again. Look at the expression on the face of the old man in the background. Knowing Val, I don’t think this was an accidentally excellent shot. Here’s what Val had to say:

This gent Dr A. J. Tha serenaded us and played his sitar, along with a drummer at sunset as the fellow in the background paddled the boat down the Ganges river at sunset and we set our lighted candles to float on the water. There was a hive of activity because they were celebrating the religious festival of Diwale (The Indian equivalent of Christmas).

Sounds better coming from Val, eh? Here’s another beautiful image preceeded by Val’s comment:

The picture of the man was taken in a remote village when we went for a walk after breakfast. We had stayed in the local fort which which was being restored and used as a hotel. It was in the province of Rajasthan.

Exquisite!

And, just to show that she’s not immune the the ‘tourist shot’ here’s one of the Taj Mahal:

Hey, wait a minute! That’s not your average tourist snapshot. That’s a well-thought-out, beautifully composed photograph worthy of exhibition.

Here’s one that Val described as, “A family out for a ride on the outskirts of town.”

Nice use of the Rule of Thirds, angular elements and interesting cropping to capture the sense of motion.

This one is my favourite. Eat your heart out, National Geographic! Here’s what Val had to say:

On our ride on camels into the desert we had to take a break for some of our camel drivers to put their prayer mats down and face Mecca.

Okay, but she didn’t walk over and take a shot of the guys praying, no not Val. That would be far too obvious. They are way up in the corner. Once you start to listen to the image, hearing what it’s about, you can’t stop looking at the fellows praying. It’s a setup job. She’s tricked you. All that beautiful colour and the smiling faces are red herrings.

And here is the talented lady herself:

It can get cool in the desert overnight. On the ride out those long sleeves protected me from the hot sun. The obligatory money pouch is strung around my neck.

She keeps saying that she’s going to take root for a while.

I don’t believe a word of it.